Tag: Newbie Blogger

I started my Blogging Journey after I read a book written by Anik Singal of Lurn Nation Inc, that book is Circle of Profit. By this time last year, if you had told me I would be blogging, I would have laughed in your face. I knew what Blogging was but I didn’t understand how it worked. I never knew I will be writing about Newbie Blogging but here am I.

Fast forward some couple of months into the New year, and I read this Book (circle of Profit) that changed my life, that was when I decided to be a blogger. I purchased my domain name and hosting on the 26th of Feb 2017 but I couldn’t put down my first post because I just had a Baby in January. But then came March and I was able to.

Technically my Blog is about to clock 8 months old. In these 8 months, I have had my highs and lows, I have wanted to quit sometimes but I have kept at it because I knew it was something I wanted to do and because of the impact I am making on stay at home moms who would like to start a home business.

In this 8 months, here are the hard knocks that I will call the Ultimate cheat sheet points for Newbie Blogging

Your content Matters:

I have written various Blog posts since I started, in fact, my earlier posts are a joke because I didn’t know what I was doing or how to write a proper Blog post. I purposely left those posts because I want to see how far I have come since I have started.

The content you put out on your Blog post matters because without a good content you will not be able to attract your Niche market. I know because I have written some wishy-washy posts that only attracted me the writer Lol.

As time went on, I have learned to research my Blog posts keenly and be sure that I have enough information that will keep my audience wanting more. Without much information on your Blog post, people will be wondering why you are writing in the first place.

People( Your Niche market) are searching for a solution so when your page turns up you better provide it or they are off. The online world, unlike the real world, does not have time for you to persuade them that you will still provide what they need, people are so busy they barely have up to 5 sec to glance throughout your Blog in search of a solution.You have that much time to get their attention and keep it, where you are not able to keep it you lose them.

How do you know that you are loosing your Niche market? you can check your bounce rate from your stats, if you have a high bounce rate then chances are that you are not able to hold the attention of the people that read your blog post. Bounce rate is the percentage of the amount of time that people spend on your Post. Where it is high, its often an indication of not enough quality content or your tags are attracting the wrong people to your pages.

Cultivate your Market:

Except you are blogging for pure pleasure and don’t have any need to monetize your Blog that is when this second point won’t make much sense for you. But if you are planning to monetize then the sensible thing to do is to cultivate your (niche) market. Take the time to plant the posts that they desire and take time to nurture your audience, they are the customers to your business, if you do not nurture them, the Blog won’t grow and your business won’t grow either.

Cultivating your market in Newbie Blogging may mean continuously giving out good content for a while without asking for anything back until your audience can trust you enough to want to pay for content when you ask them to.

In the blogging world, you have to give first before you get so it takes time and energy to keep doing what you are doing until your rewards start coming in. Some people ask how soon can one monetize a blog?, I say it depends on your audience. if you already built an audience before you launched your Blog, then you perhaps may be able to start immediately but if you just started out with zero credibility, then you have to take time to build it.

Networking Matters:

Sometimes the reason why people like to blog is that they feel they can just hide behind a computer system and just type away. Again you can only do that if you have no interest in making money from your blog. If you do have the intention to make money then you have to get out from behind your computer and connect with other people.

That’s how you will get to understand what works and what doesn’t work. You will also learn a ton of stuff from the discussions especially if you join Facebook groups that are important. In these groups, you will be able to see opportunities that will help you grow your blog.

Through networking, you will also increase your chances of gaining access to sponsored posts opportunities that you will literally not have been able to get on your own.

Promoting your Content:

Okay fess up, I have written about promoting your content before in another post but it’s a point that is worth reiterating because people make the mistake of writing a great content and then waiting for the world to discover them. I mean they sit on their behinds and wait but all they hear is crickets.

In this age where attention span is just a flash, for Newbie Blogging, you have to be out there promoting what you have got or you never get discovered. That’s why you can’t even start a blog without having your socials (I am talking about Facebook, Twitter Pinterest, and Instagram) set up. These 4 social networks are the most basic which you must have before you go anywhere else. I believe its good practice to start engaging with your audience on these platforms even before you launch your blog.

I made that same mistake and I regret it, my socials are not well built up today because I waited too long to start a socials page for my Blog. Then I only even started Facebook and I never had a share button installed on my Blog until someone pointed it out to me.

You will think that should be something I could have figured out so easily but I didn’t since I am not a blogging pro. I believe that setting up your social pages and installing your share buttons should come first before you launch your blog post. This is because even when people visit your page and they would like to read it later, the only way they can save it is by sharing on their own social page which gives you more exposure. If they can’t-do that you have lost that opportunity of getting your content out there.

If you had like a free printable social Network description for a New Blog click here

Printable Social Network Description

Research the Niche of your Newbie Blogging and Then go find where they Hang out:

I never understood how powerful the word Niche could be in Newbie Blogging until I started my Blog. When I decided I wanted to blog, I had no idea what my blog will be about.

It took me days of researching and trying to fit my experience and skills to know what I wanted to blog about. I had to then decide what niche I was going to play in. it was quite a tough one but I nailed it when I was able to marry my interest and burning passion with the people that needed it, that’s how I came about blogging about helping stay at home moms start a home business to support their lifestyle.

This was the aspect I struggled a lot with and I also know that a lot of Newbie bloggers still struggle with. Sometimes It takes a whole lot of time and perhaps even practice before you are able to narrow down to what really works for you.

In my own case, I knew that my ability to have a home business helped me a great deal to manage the issues of having kids and still earning a living. I then decided that Blogging and its related business will serve me well and also help my audience achieve their main goal of staying at home with their babies while also growing a business. I may not have the typical audience that is easy to sport just like you have maybe Football lovers but I do know that there are millions of women who struggle daily with having to leave their jobs to become a Stay at home mom and also those who want to become one but can’t afford to because they need the income they make from their jobs, still I press on in finding them through the forums and groups I visit and belong to in other to pass to them the help that they need to get to where they want to be.

Do you have another cheat sheet point you had like to add for Newbie Blogging, leave a comment below?

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Affiliate incomes are often the easiest way to start earning money on your Blog as a newbie blogger. This is because it is often about promoting other people’s products that you have used before, or you believe in. By promoting these products, you make money by getting a commission once you make a sale. This idea is used by many product creators to get people to market their products, It’s a win-win idea. For some of the affiliates I mentioned in my checklist, you can make up to 60% of the products price as a commission when you make a sale.
Affiliate marketing is one income avenue you can easily use to start monetizing your blog right from the beginning without creating your own products. if you are good on affiliates, you may even find it earns you a chunk of your Blog income before you start creating your own products.

There is one snag about affiliates though, not all affiliates will accept your application to be an affiliate of their products because they have their own specifications on the type of audience they want and the number of followings you have on social media. While that reason can motivate some people to go work on their numbers, it can also discourage some few people.

When I started my blogging journey, I thought I will be accepted on every affiliate network I applied to once I had my domain name and a few posts on my blog but it wasn’t so. I wished there was a list that could show me which ones will accept me and which ones will not so I could focus on applying to those ones instead of going through rejects. So I have created a checklist of some affiliate networks that will easily accept a newbie Blogger.

Since you are a newbie Blogger, you may want to read my post on the best plugins to use. In that post, I explained the 7 must have Plugins for every new blogger.

Plugins are essential for the smooth running of a blog. One person likened Plugins to the plumbing’s you need in a house to enable it to have some functionalities that make it better to use.

Officially according to Wikipedia a Plugin is defined as software that adds extra features to an existing computer program thereby enabling customization of that program. For example, when you add a social warfare plugin, you can enable your social media buttons on your page in other for people to share your content.

As a new Blogger, that is just starting out, there are various terms that may seem new to you, one of them is Plugins, when you start out you may wonder if you need them or not, but as you get along the blogging journey you tend to discover that they are a necessity especially if you are not Techie and you don’t want to outsource any part of your blog build up due to lack of funds.

If you are like me, with little funds to spare and you get to realize that you are going to be working daily at this Blog, It is better to learn the necessary things that are required to enable you to run the blog efficiently, hence my adventure into the use of Plugins.

Plugins are like lifesavers, especially if you have been trying to get something fixed and you have wondered how it is done, only to realize that a plugin could easily do it for you without much stress. For example, when I wanted to verify my Pinterest site, I tried uploading my HTML tag but I couldn’t do it. But once I used my Yoast SEO social, it was done instantly. I was so happy the day it happened that I went about smiling all day.

Having learned a few things since I started my Blog in March, here are some Plugins that I know you can’t do without.

Akismet: Akismet is a plugin that enables you to protect your Blog from spam attacks, it’s the first thing you must have before you ever launch your Blog. You don’t want to start battling with Spam attacks from day 1, they can mess up your Blog posts especially from the comments section. Before you can install Akismet, you have to get what they call an API key, consider your API key like a house key which you need to unlock the door to your house. Your API key is gotten after you have registered with the provider of the Plugin. it’s after you key in your API key that Akismet can start working. If you are using the JVzoo Host, you will find that the provider of the WordPress site already comes with the Akismet already pre -installed, you just have to network activate to get it running. To sign up with my hosting company click Here: Sign up now for hosting

The good thing about it is that its free and open source, you don’t have to pay a dime once you have it installed on your system. You only need your updates once in a while and it’s still free.

Google XML sitemap: Wow, this is the second must have Plugin, it helps you index your Blog with most search engines, like Google, Bing, and webmasters. When I started my Blog, I didn’t know much about this plugin, I thought that once you enable the settings through your admin section that authorizes search engines to index your website that was it. But I soon found out I was wrong because when I typed my web address, my blog never came up. So I read up some more on it and I found that I needed to submit my website to various search engines for indexing, I tried to but the process was a bit complicated for me until I discovered this plugin, Google XML sitemap that helps one to do it without all the stress of trying to do it one by one.

To install google XML sitemap follow these directions

Go to your Admin section

Click on Network activate, then go down to appearance and click on Plugin then click on Add new.

Now go ahead and search for Google XML sitemap and click on Network activate, then you can go ahead and install it on your Blog.

Key things I look out for when installing a plugin

1- Number of installations it has had

2 The ratings

3 When last the version was updated.

4Compatibility: whether it is compatible with the version of WordPress that I use.

All these factors help me to know how well a plugin will perform. This is because if it has 100’s of thousands of active installs or even in millions, it means, many people trust it and are consistently using it. If its ratings are high, chances are also that it is good. If the plugin is constantly updated, that means it’s much less vulnerable to hackers. Old un Updated Plugins are often used by hackers as a backdoor to your website, beware of using them.

Google Analytics: Google Analytics enables you to track your page views and your sources of traffic. This is a very important data if you want to grow as a Blogger. It’s a popular saying that what you can’t measure you can’t improve on. So it’s important that you have your Google analytics installed from day 1 of your blogging activity as this will allow you see your data trends with time. It will also tell you which countries that most of your traffic is coming from. Under its reports, it will also give you the metrics of where your traffic is coming from and where they terminate. It will give you an idea of how your posts are performing. From your GA, you will get to know which of your Posts high traffic attractors are. In fact running a blog without GA is liking flying a Plane without radar.

Yoast SEO: My encounter with Yoast SEO helped me shape my writing skills to better create a rankable content. Yoast SEO has the analysis that tells you if the content you are going to post has a good SEO and also if the readability is good. These two points are important if you want your Posts to come up during a search. The feedback it gives you allows you put down a better write up. It has some basic features and also a Paid feature. You can start with a basic feature and then upgrade to a paid one as you scale. It’s a very good Plugin because it helps analyze your content before it goes live. It has a very good support network and also offers some training on how to use it.

Loginizer: Loginizer is a security plugin you may want to try, because I was a new blogger, I didn’t take my security so serious until I started having attacks from hackers who were trying to hack my blog I wrote to my host company JVzoo who quickly offered me support and advised on what plugins to use to protect myself from spammers and hackers. I picked up this plugin because I didn’t want to go the route of rewriting my admin login configure. It helped to protect my Blog from brutal force attacks.

It works by blocking IPs that exceed a maximum number of trials to log in, a frequent feature of hackers. It also enables you to blacklist frequent IPS that are always trying to Log into your blog. Loginizer is easy to use because it’s just plugged and play. It has a paid feature though.

Social warfare; When I started my blog, I have often wondered how to get my share buttons on my page to enable people to share my content. When your content gets shared, it enables more traffic to come to your page. I was participating in a Facebook group page when someone got my attention by suggesting this wonderful plugin. Social warfare enables you to activate your social media buttons hence enabling anyone that comes to your page to share your content. Since I installed it, I have been able to keep track of my contents shares on social media, it has helped me know what has worked for my posts and what does not work. That way I am consistently working to improve myself. While I am not yet perfect yet, it’s a journey I am enjoying. To get this Plugin, click Here Social warfare

Ebook store: If you are like most bloggers who want to monetize their blog immediately through the sale of their own EBook, then you should try installing eBook store, it’s a plugin that is integrated with woo commerce to enable you to add a cart to your blog site. It is a paid plugin meaning that if you want to be able to synchronize it with your PayPal account, then you have to pay their monthly subscription in other to have the features that help you receive payment. EBook store works perfectly well if you are the store owner. Another feature that may work for you if you are selling stuff from your Blog is the Shopify app. it enables you to set up your eCommerce store in a bit.

Shopifyis a complete ecommerce solution that allows you to set up an online store to sell your goods. It lets you organize your products customize your storefront accept credit card payments, track and respond to orders all with a few clicks of the mouse.

If you found this post helpful, that means you are a newbie blogger, congratulations on starting out on this wonderful journey read this 7 Helpfultips for the home business ownerto help get your self-prepared for the journey ahead.